Michael Ware

Journalist

NBC: Battle for Fallujah


Click photo to play
Length: 2:11

TOM BROKAW: Time Magazine's Baghdad Bureau Chief Michael Ware has been traveling with the Army's 2nd Battalion/2nd Infantry Regiment, the soldiers who were in the first vehicles that entered Fallujah on Monday. Ware has been shooting his own video along the way, and tonight we have some scenes from a battle that took place on a rooftop overlooking a mosque and a school being used by the insurgents. Time Magazine's Michael Ware tonight, in his own words.

MICHAEL WARE: They were taking fire from all directions. It was impossible to tell where it was going to come from next. They dug in for two or three hours, repelling each enemy attack, looking for the snipers who were trying to pick them off from hidden vantage points in the surrounding buildings.

This army unit proceeded in their tanks and their armored Bradley fighting vehicles, pushing through the resistance fighters. From the rooftops, they were able to engage the insurgents, using every weapon at their disposal, from missiles to heavy machine guns to grenade launchers.

There was the smell of blood, there was the grit and the grime in which we were encased, there was the confusion of battle -- the screams, the fear, the adrenaline.

So many of them can barely be described as men. They're boys, baby-faced, some of them fresh out of high school. They are going to be doing this all night, they're going to be doing this all day tomorrow. And even though many of us believe that we're coming to the end of this dreadful battle for Fallujah, for them, this engagement in many ways is far from over.